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From: d91frera@ida.liu.se (FReDRiK RaMSBeRG (WILdcARD))
Subject: Re: QuickBasic 4.5 and Parsers
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Date: Mon, 12 Feb 1996 21:18:41 GMT
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avia@netvision.net.il (Alex Oren) writes:

>jessem@comtch.iea.com (Jesse McGrew) wrote:

>: Are you trying to write a text game in Basic? That's quite an undertaking
>: if you want a decent parser (one that can handle "bob, find jones. tell
>: him to drive the car to my house, take all of the red boxes and two of the
>: green ones, and bring it to me" correctly). 

This kind of answers can only help to discourage people from writing
IF stories. I presume this wasn't your intention.

Anyway, what is correct here? The sentence is ambigous. No human could be
certain about whether it's Bob or Jones who is supposed to bring you the
boxes, so how do you expect the game to be?

>Is there a sample source (in C or any other "mainstream" language) of a
>parset that's capable of such feats?

No matter what, the stuff described above rules out _at least_ 98% of the
parsers used in shareware games today, and something like 90% of the Infocom
parsers. Let's suppose Quickbasic is, overall, the best system available to
the author, on that platform, and make the best of it; A parser that handles
the following will be no big problem to anyone skilled in BASIC;

bob, go to the cabin and tell jones to drive the car to my house
get all
put the small green key on the table

I'd say that this level of parser will never feel like a constraint either
when designing or playing the game. It's better to put the effort into the
story than making a super-mega-parser that will at least _try_ to evaluate
sentences so complicated that no one ever types them. 

Let's not forget that the goal of making IF stories is to amuse the player,
not to provide pornography for Natural Language Parsing enthusiasts. (Or did
I get it all wrong?)




Let the IF tradition live,

/Fredrik Ramsberg
--
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Fredrik Ramsberg, student at Linkoeping University
Hi-tech-mail: d91frera@und.ida.liu.se
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